


Off the Shelf

by thatfruitcake (yusukesjeans)



Category: Gouhou Drug | Legal Drug, Wish (Manga)
Genre: M/M, Other, Pre-Series, spoilers for Drug & Drop chapter 15, spoilers for all of Wish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 01:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yusukesjeans/pseuds/thatfruitcake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculative origins of two men and a drugstore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Off the Shelf

**Author's Note:**

> My initial reaction to the revelation in Drug & Drop chapter 15 was to hate it. This is my attempt to fix that.
> 
> I haven’t read the official English translation of Wish in years and I don’t have the books readily available to me so I don’t know what the official romanizations of everyone’s names are. If what I’ve chosen doesn’t match up to the English version, I apologize and I hope it doesn’t detract from reading. I know the Tokyopop translation used the logic of “all angels use female pronouns, all demons use male pronouns” despite stating angels and demons are genderless, but I wanted to stick to genderless angels and demons as much as possible.  
> Also I took a bit of liberty with stringing kanji together into pithy sounding English name meanings. Sorry about that. 
> 
> As for locations, CLAMP does confirm that both Green Drugstore and Kudou Shuuichirou’s house are located in Tokyo, and there is at least one tree-lined street between them. Everything else is inference and imagination.

Kudou Shuichirou died and was buried, Kohaku slept on inside the garden's tree, and that was that for a while.  
  
Upon banishment, Hisui truly noticed the absence of Heavenly light for the first time, a feeling of emptiness where there had once been connection, but for Hisui the feeling was more like finally shaking a headache.  A headache that took the form of a nagging voice Hisui hadn’t realized was still there saying “This is wrong; you have somewhere you need to be.”  But that could all be put behind them now. God had issued their punishment and Hisui felt they’d both gotten off rather lightly.   Like Hisui, Kokuyou also sensed a dulling connection to Hell, but demons never had the relationship with guilt that angels did.  For Kokuyou all banishment meant was no more meddling relatives. It was a relief to both of them to be lost causes at last, rather than a wayward lamb or an incorrigible nuisance.  
  
Hisui and Kokuyou might not have been able to return to Heaven or Hell, but they were still not humans. They did now need to eat, but eating was not much of a burden, both because it was delicious and because they now _could_.  In addition to food, they needed to sleep, but they'd gotten used to doing enough of that anyway at Shuichirou's home, both at night and while their other housemates were out for the day, just as an excuse to lie tangled up around each other.  
  
They would not die -- not of natural causes anyway -- so in theory they could just wait out the hundred years set out before them, teaching each other how to cook or do the washing, or simply lounging around together in the empty rooms of Kudou Shuichirou's home, until Kohaku awakened to meet the man’s reincarnation.  But with their banishment to Earth came an awareness of time, and to sit about unchanging just began to feel like a waste. If they had wanted everything to feel just like it had in Heaven or in Hell or in that bridge between the two, eternal and lovely and lazy, well, they never would have left.  
  
After all, a hundred years was a long time to just wait -- that was why God had allowed Kohaku to sleep through that time to begin with -- and though they kept a close eye on the Kudou property as promised, other things arose.  
  
Unlike Hisui, Kokuyou had never been forbidden from entering the mortal realm: tempting souls was part of Hell’s business.  As a result, Kokuyou had multiple lifetimes of old contacts to call on in Tokyo’s underworld who any number of demonic underlings had enticed to evil at some time or other.  In exchange for their continued friendship, Kokuyou would occasionally be asked to procure an item for them, or make some kind of delivery.  No longer an angel, Hisui had few qualms about helping.  It was a way to meet all manner of people, try out all kinds of human shapes, and learn how humans got around the city.  Even without Heaven’s light, Hisui seemed to occasionally see things that came in handy, beyond what a mortal could perceive, and Kokuyou’s unique abilities also remained intact.  It began as simply a way to pass the time, but rumors soon spread of a couple who seemed to have an uncanny ability to predict movements, or to locate things and people.  Before long they had drummed up quite a business, doing odd jobs for those who were in need or simply curious -- and sometimes the jobs were very odd indeed.    
  
Kokuyou wondered aloud sometimes if working as what was effectively a yakuza courier was really a fitting occupation for even the _former_ Archangel of Wind, but Hisui reminded the demon cheerfully that not _all_ of their jobs came from the yakuza, and left the conversation at that.  Hisui knew an angel should be concerned about what the objects they picked up would be used for, or what would become of the humans they interacted with.  But Hisui hadn’t thought much about far reaching moral consequences when first becoming involved with Kokuyou, and based on how quickly Kokuyou offered an eye in exchange for Hisui’s affections and promise of life together in the human world, the demon hadn’t either.  So what was the point in pondering the finer ethical questions now?  Kokuyou always seemed more amused than concerned, anyway.  So they continued to do the jobs, together.  
  
The locations of missing supernatural possessions were not the only thing Hisui would occasionally see.  Snatches of a future, two boys with intertwined fates.  One day, those boys would come to them seeking answers, but not yet.  Hisui and Kokuyou knew they needed to be prepared to support those boys, to ensure the fulfillment of their destinies, but in His usual fashion God was not exactly specific about what form that support should take.  
  
Opening a business was the obvious choice.  It would give those boys a physical place to come to, as well as a reason to stay.  Humans would do nearly anything to keep little scraps of paper moving amongst themselves, and as long as money was involved, nearly anything could be overlooked. With the assistance of Kokuyou's yakuza contacts, they found the ideal storefront, centrally located, and with a small apartment with included kitchen above. But what type of business would it become?  
  
Somehow a pharmacy seemed like a natural choice for two heretics who were as of yet undecided whether they were providing remedy or destruction for their human neighbors, or merely living for their own hedonism.  If nothing else it made a convenient front for their under-the-table transactions.  And so the Green Drugstore was born.  
  
They ended up focusing on the retail aspect initially, since that was easier to establish without credentials.  Just some inventory to record the movements of on paper while they kept up their real jobs as paranormal jacks of all trades. But before long Hisui began to take an interest in the business of pharmacy itself, first picking up books on chemical compositions and drug names during their free time.  These topics didn’t interest Kokuyou at all, but “Why not learn everything we can?” Hisui explained, smiling in a way that was comforting despite all of its ambiguity. “It’s not as if we don’t have the time.”  
  
Before long Hisui decided to register for classes at a local university: a proper pharmacist needed a license, and counterfeits could only get one so far.  Where Hisui’s passion had come from Kokuyou could only guess, but it was likely something to do with the visions the former angel saw.    
  
By virtue of not _really_ owning or renting the building and not _really_ being a store that was open to just anyone (save the chance schoolgirl who happened to walk in to buy a lipgloss during the sporadic hours when Hisui and Kokuyou were not fulfilling the requests of some client) Green Drugstore and its proprietors had avoided legal documentation up until this point.  But taking classes at a university required records of one’s previous educational background, not to mention maintaining a consistent name and properly human appearance.  So records and identities would have to be developed.    
  
Some parts of that came about relatively naturally.  Soon after leaving the Kudou house they’d both folded away their wings and found themselves adjusting to more average human heights -- which for Hisui mostly meant properly walking instead of floating.  Kokuyou had taken to wearing sunglasses to cover the missing eye and slit pupil.  They knew that humans generally conformed to one of two sexes and adjusted accordingly to be perceived as such.  Anyone passing them on the street would see only two ordinary men, one large as a bear, with short dark hair and dark glasses, the other smaller but somehow no less imposing, despite his more delicate features and fall of asymmetrically-cut brown hair.  (Anyone passing them on the street might also notice that they seemed to have a difficult time keeping their hands off of each other, but somehow everyone seemed to know better than to comment on it.)  
  
The next pieces in their mortal identities were names.    
Kokuyuo had always been an uncomplicated man, even before he was one technically. He chose his new name, “Saiga,” purely out of his own sense of blasphemy.  The son of Satan taking on a name like "purification on a high mountain"? _He_ didn't abstain from _anything_.  
  
When asked, Hisui, dubbed “Kakei,” would argue that his chosen name was just as simply conceived. “Flowers and fireflies are just so lovely,” he explained with a pleasant smile, brushing a strand of hair behind his ear. After all, even a _former_ angel could not deny his appreciation for God’s beautiful creations. But Kokuyou’s eyebrows rose as he read the kanji together as "flower's fluorescence" and remembered that in the natural world, the most brightly colored organisms were often the most dangerous. Kakei smiled just as sweetly as Hisui always had, but there was a glint of steel behind his eyes.  
  
So Kakei balanced work in the store with what evening classes he could enroll in and Saiga went out and “searched” for things and then Hisui came home and studied and Kokuyou made dinner and pursued hobbies of his own.  He was learning to sew, and was surprised to find he was rather keen at it.    
  
Kakei took to wearing glasses when he went to his courses, and then at home or at the store while he was studying, and before long he’d taken to wearing them as often as Saiga wore his sunglasses, only taking them off when the two of them were entirely alone.  Kokuyou had always loved being able to gaze into those eyes unobstructed, but he came to love equally the glare his partner would give him over the tops of the lenses when he’d lean over his books to try to distract him from studying.  
   
They laid down every night together in their bed above the shop and shared occasional post coital cigarettes while Kakei would murmur about chemicals like nicotine or dopamine or oxytocin and the effects they had on humans and Saiga would stroke the soft hairs at the base of Kakei’s neck.  
  
And if the Green Drugstore kept incredibly variable and unusual hours for a few years, no one of the general public really seemed to notice.  
  
Then Kakei graduated and took his licensure exams.  He passed with flying colors.  They kept up the Green Drugstore but the paranormal errands that had once been its main line of work were relegated to “side jobs,” only taken when particularly interesting, or when Kakei saw something in his precognitive visions that compelled either of them to participate.  They needed the jobs, he said, but not right now, and Saiga felt one way or another that he knew what Kakei was talking about.     
  
From that point onward, the Green Drugstore and the building it sat in began to exist on paper for the first time.  Kakei was a natural at balancing the books and making everything run smoothly. Before long they had bought the place from its gangster owners and moved out of the shop to a small but well-appointed apartment nearby. They left the rooms above the shop vacant, furniture covered by sheets to protect it from dust.    
  
And along the neighboring streets, cherry trees bloomed and faded.  Fallen blossoms were ground down to mud by thousands of feet, before being swept into gutters by summer’s rains, and replaced by maples and gingkoes showing their own colors.  Crisp frost settled and melted, buds sprung up, and the cycle repeated itself again, over and over.  
   
Tokyo was a force to be reckoned with during any season, but the city’s uncountable lights always seemed to glitter particularly enticingly when reflected in a newly fallen dusting of snow.    
  
Kakei and Saiga closed up the Green Drugstore on one such night and stepped out into the quiet street, empty except for a few straggling commuters brandishing umbrellas against the flurries.    
  
Kakei pocketed the store’s keys, but he and Saiga lingered outside the door.  Fat flakes stuck to their coats and hair and melted in wet drops on their glasses.  Saiga wrapped his arms around Kakei, his lover, his angel, the one who held half his power and his left eye, and Kakei leaned into the touch, ends of his windswept hair tickling Saiga’s face.    
  
“They’re coming, aren’t they?” Saiga murmured, warm breath caressing the nape of his partner’s neck.  
  
“Not long now,” Kakei agreed, leaning his head back to rest against Saiga’s broad shoulder, smiling up into the snowflakes flurrying around them.  “Not long.”


End file.
